I grew up believing in democracy. I'll bet you did too. I spent 20 years of my life in democratic schools. I'll bet you did too.

Suppose you were a Catholic in 16th-century Spain. Imagine how hard it would be for you to stop believing in Catholicism.

You are a Catholic. Your parents were Catholics. You were educated by Catholics. You are governed by Catholics. All your friends are Catholics. All the books you've ever read were written by Catholics.

Sure, you're aware that not everyone in the world is a Catholic. You're also aware that this is the cause of all the violence, death and destruction in the world.

Look at what Protestants do when they get into power. They nail genitals to the city gates. They behead their own wives. Crazy stuff! And let's not even start on the Turks...

Now suppose you're you. But you have a time machine that lets you talk to this 16th-century Spanish Catholic version of you.

How do you convince this guy or gal that the answer to all the world's problems is not "more Catholicism"? How do you say, um, dude, this Trinity thing - the virgin birth - transsubstantiation... ya know...

So you see how hard it is to explain that democracy is bunk.

Of course, I could be wrong. Who the heck am I? No one. And everyone who is someone agrees: democracy is wonderful.

So I'm not telling you that democracy is bunk. I'm just suggesting you might want to consider the possibility.

Or even just consider considering the possibility. The way you consider, like, UFOs, or something. Put it down in the "extremely improbable, but not inherently impossible" category.

One way to consider this question is to look at an alternative. You can't beat nothing with something. If you didn't believe in democracy, what would you believe in? Here's my answer. (Warning: it's long.)

Another classic approach, though, is just to write up a list of heretical theses. Red pills, you might say. It worked for Luther - why shouldn't it work for me?

I won't (in this post) attempt to explain or justify these theses. They are for you, the reader, to analyze, to justify or refute.

For convenience, I've matched each red pill with a blue pill. The blue pill represents the orthodox democratic perspective. If I'm wrong and democracy is not bunk, the blue pills are reality and the red pills are poisonous lies. Swallow at your own risk.

Ten pills:

Peace, prosperity, and freedom

blue pill:

Democracy is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity, and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.

red pill:

The rule of law is responsible for the present state of peace, prosperity and freedom in the US, Europe and Japan.

Democracy, freedom, and law

blue pill:

Democracy is inseparable from freedom and law.

red pill:

At best, democracy is sand in the gears of freedom and law. At worst it excludes them entirely, as in Iraq.

Fascism and communism

blue pill:

The disasters of fascism and communism demonstrate the importance of representative democracy.

red pill:

Fascism and communism are best understood as forms of democracy. The difference between single-party and multiparty democracy is like the difference between a malignant tumor and a benign one.

The nature of the state

blue pill:

The state is established by citizens to serve their needs. Its actions are generally righteous.

red pill:

The state is just another giant corporation. Its actions generally advance its own interests. Sometimes these interests coincide with ours, sometimes they don't.

The power structure of the West

blue pill:

Power in the West is held by the people, who have to guard it closely against corrupt politicians and corporations.

red pill:

Power in the West is held by the civil service, that is, the permanent employees of the state. In any struggle between the civil service and politicians or corporations, the civil service wins.

The extent of the state

blue pill:

The state consists of elected officials and their appointees.

red pill:

The state consists of all those whose interests are aligned with the state. This includes NGOs, universities, and the press, all of whose employees are effectively civil servants, and side with the civil service in almost all conflicts.

The danger of right-wing politics

blue pill:

Right-wing politicians, and the ignorant masses who support them, are a danger to democracy. They must be stopped.

red pill:

Right-wing politicians are a classic democratic phenomenon. Domestically, they have little power and are mostly harmless. Their international adventures are destructive, but they are inescapable consequences of democracy itself.

Democracy and nonpartisan government

blue pill:

True democracy is not merely the rule of politicians. For a democracy to succeed, a nonpartisan decisionmaking process is essential. Civil servants, especially judges, must be isolated from politics, or they will become corrupt.

red pill:

Democracy is politics. Any other definition is Orwellian. The absence of politics is the absence of democracy, and apolitical civil-service government is indeed better than democracy. But this is a low standard to surpass.

The history of Western government

blue pill:

The present system of Western government is the result of adapting 19th-century classical liberalism to the complex modern world.

red pill:

Western governments today are clones of the quasi-democratic FDR regime, whose best modern comparisons are leaders like Mubarak, Putin or Suharto. Its origin was the Progressive movement, which broke classical liberalism, then complained that it didn't work.

The future of Western government

blue pill:

The Western world is moving toward a globalized, transnational free market in which politics is increasingly irrelevant, and technocratic experts and NGOs play larger roles in fighting corruption, protecting the environment, and delivering essential public services.

red pill:

Civil-service government works well at first, but it degrades. Its limit as time approaches infinity is sclerotic Brezhnevism. Its justification for ruling is inseparable from democracy, which is mystical nonsense and is rapidly disappearing. It cannot survive without a captive media and educational system, which the Internet will route around. Also, its financial system is a mess and could collapse at any minute. The whole thing will be lucky if it lasts another ten years.

Considered the Schumpeterian model, according to which the main, maybe only, merit of democracy is that it throws the bastards out on a regular basis. That quite a merit, though.

While I'm here, a few comments on your pills.

1. Too many worthy abstractions here. But re: Japan; if peace, prosperity, and freedom rested on democracy, they wouldn't have much of them, and they obviously do, though maybe not so much of last.

2. Blue pill: obviously false. Red pill: sometimes you (or non-elites, anyway) want some sand in the gears of the law. Your mention of "freedom" here is just rhetoric, no?

3. Blue pill: Fascism and communism were catastrophes of lawlessness, or rather "revolutionary legality". But until we can revive a healthy respect for monarchy, democracy is the only principle that can legimate a lawgiver.

Red pill: Yes, Nazism and fascism had a social-revolutionary aspect, but a lot of their democratic pretensions were pure facade. As for communism, well, I was made to read C.B. Macpherson's Real World of Democracy not once but twice in my academic career, so I am aware that some people can pronounce the phrase "People's Democracy" with a straight face. But these regimes tended to collapse at the first competitive elections (absent police repression), didn't they? A counterpoint is that in their latter years, they tended to develop bloated and unsustainable social-welfare policies in an attempt to buy popular acceptance.

4. Blue: If you don't have a state, you'll want to establish one toute suite, I think.

Red: No utopia, it's true.

Pill 5. Blue: The people are not the sort of organism that can hold power.

Red: You're wrong here. I consulted in civil-service bureaucracies for 10, and here, at any rate, they dance to the politicians' tune. Very much so. That's generally the pattern in the Anglosphere outside the United States, which appears to have a strange of institutional pluralism without any single power centre. In countries with the Westminster system, politicians (mostly rightwingers, but also, notably, Blair) have discovered that many of the conventions limiting executive power were just gentleman's agreements that they could tear up at will. You were closer to the truth in a comment at the Blowhards, when you said the universities and and media hold the power. That's absolutely true: they brew up the Kool-Aid that everyone else drinks, especially policy types in the civil service and most of the political parties. It's true though, that a key ingredient of this Kool-Aid is the belief that state action can cure all ills.

6. Blue pill: Surely everyone regards the police, for example, as an arm of the state.

Red pill: If the state is all-encompassing then it is likely to become a battlefield rather than an actor. So, the environmental NGOs may cosy up to the Environment Ministry, but not to the Ministry of Forests, which is in the pockets of the forest companies or unions, depending on which party is in power. Ultimately cabinet ministers may end up shouting at each other, which is blue-pill democracy.

Schumpeter: Glenn Reynolds, of all people, has a paper making the same argument. (Google "Why is democracy like sex?") But maybe we could have no bastards at all...

2: Not at all! Check out Kuehnelt-Leddihn, he'll blow your mind...

3: We have competitive elections. But who competes? Thus my malignant vs. benign analogy... Look at the bogus "two-party" regime Putin is trying to set up.

5: I believe that it's different in the parliamentary Anglosphere. A little - Sir Humphrey Appleby, anyone? And there's Brussels to consider as well.

I have never worked for the civil service, but I have two parents and one step-parent who were career...

Basically my view is that the universities and the media are part of the civil service, because I believe that responsibility is always identical with power, and all have the same ethic of civic responsibility (which is quite sincere).

6: Yes, police are civil servants too, even if they vote for the wrong party! And yes, the squabbles are endless - but they are what the Soviets used to call the "inner-party struggle..."

As regards Progressives (university-affiliated and otherwise) I would just point out that they have almost always seized power by claiming to represent or work on behalf of the huddled masses. (For example, their first great successes in the U.S. came from the introduction of public health...and who can argue with public health? Or resist authority structures designed to ensure it, and to be insulated from urban machine politics, etc.? It sure worked like a charm on ethnic ward boss politicians, who had no idea what hit them!)

The connection is so pervasive that I wonder what would happen if the progressives opened up the robe fully and admitted their real agenda is serving themselves. Can the meritocracy, the modern version of ancien regime aristocracy,claim power openly as the sword and shield of the state? Frankly, the Progressives seem to doubt their ability to do without the fig leaf of ruling on behalf of the oppressed.

I have a sort of hazy impression that much of your thought seems to involve categories very much like those of pre-Revolutionary France. This isn't entirely surprising, given how rapidly the contemporary U.S. is converging with the nation of Louis XIV. Have you considered making these parallels and echoes explicit?

So I read this post, and your essay on "formalism." Formalism, if I read it right, sounds like a benevolent dictatorship, as you say that Singapore represents the best political situation. Which may well be true.

The problem with benevolent dictatorships is that it relies on the benevolence of the dictator. Which cannot be relied upon for very long, and cannot be recitified without the ability to "throw the bums out." Which is democracy.

Your blue pills resonate with me, and your red pills remind me of a Chomskian worldview that I do not share but cannot disprove. The truth, I suspect, is somewhere in a wise synthesis of those elements that make both true.

Democracy is not essentially bunk; it just may not be the appropriate system of government for a society that is mega-urban, mega-industrialized, mega-technologized and mega-territorial. In other words, everything about this place has changed since democracy was first established EXCEPT democracy itself.

FvB - yes. You can think of formalism as a kind of "truth and reconciliation," in which the state admits its true nature and its subjects accept it. A substantial concession on both sides.

The outcome of 1789 was so awful that it's hard to draw many constructive lessons from it, except perhaps "don't do that." But Jouvenel is really excellent on this subject - worth a gander.

Michael - the goal of formalism is to set up a situation in which such benevolence is very much in the interest of the proprietor, and the proprietor is an anonymous shareholding conglomerate rather than an inbred monarch with various hereditary psychological issues.

jhorgan - look at the history of communes that tried to run themselves on a democratic basis, like the utopian communities of the early 20th and late 19th centuries. Given their small size and committed membership they had all the advantages. Or look at Athens, for that matter. Success is not unheard of, but it's not common, either.